College Plans ‘Writing New Jersey’ Series

February 15, 2012

Atlantic Cape Community College will host “Writing New Jersey,” a series of readings and interviews with celebrated writers who have an intimate connection with New Jersey. Award-winning poet and Beacons by the Sea Visiting Professor Kathleen Graber selected the guests and will lead them in an interview.

All events are free and open to the public. They will be held from 12:30-1:45 p.m. in A-110 on the Mays Landing Campus, 5100 Black Horse Pike. The events will feature:

Tuesday, Feb. 28 – Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House and the forthcoming book, Unbuilt Projects. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., where he was twice a fellow. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. He is currently the New Voices Professor at Rutgers-Camden. http://paullisicky.com/

Tuesday, March 27 – Laura McCullough is a New Jersey writer, having spent most of her life on the Jersey Shore. All of the poems in her most recent book, Panic, winner of a 2009 Kinereth Gensler Award, are located at New Jersey beaches and towns -- Wildwood, Ocean City, Asbury Park -- or the sandy woods of the Pine Barrens. McCullough has been awarded two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships, one in prose and one in poetry. She holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction from Goddard College, and her essays, criticism, poems and short fiction have appeared in The Georgia Review, New South, Guernica, The American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, and others. http://lauramccullough.weebly.com/index.html

Tuesday, April 10 – Anthony Carelli was raised in Poynette, Wis., and studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before completing a master of fine arts degree in poetry at New York University. His poems have appeared in various magazines, including AGNI, Columbia and The New Yorker. His first book of poems, Carnations, was published in 2011 as part of the Princeton University Press series of contemporary poets. He is the 2011-2012 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. http://www.anthonycarelli.com

In addition to leading this writer series, Graber is teaching Poetry Workshop this semester at Atlantic Cape. She is an assistant professor of English in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first poetry collection, Correspondence, was the winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. In 2003 and 2009, Graber was the recipient of fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She also has been recognized as a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University and an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar. In 2011, Graber received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Poetry and received the Junior Scholar Award from Virginia Commonwealth University.

For more information on “Writing New Jersey,” contact Denise Coulter, English department chair, at (609) 343-4961 or dcoulter@atlantic.edu.